NY Times Lets Racist Groups Distance Themselves From Racist Founder

"Posted by  Micah Uetricht

April 27th, 2011

Last week Nick Mendoza debunked Dr. John Tanton’s original reasons for pushing an anti-immigrant/environmentalist agenda when he founded three highly influential national anti-immigrant groups, as described in a recent New York Times profile. But beyond Tanton’s bogus green/xenophobic link, the piece itself is problematic. The Times should have taken a closer look at some of Tanton’s organizations’ recent reports and staff members’ statements. They reveal that these groups have always staked a far-right position on immigration that includes dehumanization of immigrants and offensive characterizations of Latinos. The failure of the paper of record to take these groups to task for their blatant racism shows how far to the right the public discourse on immigration has shifted.

Julie Hollar, managing editor of Extra! Magazine at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, calls the Times’ coverage “completely irresponsible” in an interview with Campus Progress. “If media are going to use these groups as sources, the public has a right to be informed, every time they're quoted, about their racism,” she says.
“The Times probably saw this as a ‘balanced’ way of being critical of Tanton without invoking the ire of the right,” Hollar says. “The debate always tends to boil down to questions about ‘enforcement’ or ‘amnesty,’ and the sources tend to be anti-immigration groups like [the Center for Immigration Studies]versus business groups. What gets lost is the voices of immigrant rights groups and, most importantly, immigrants themselves—which also goes a long way to explaining the ease with which the right has succeeded in dehumanizing and demonizing immigrants in this country.”
Throughout the article, staff members of the three groups—the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), NumbersUSA, and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS)—repeatedly distance themselves from Dr. Tanton’s overtly racist statements.
“The fear was that one ugly person could tar the larger movement, and sadly, ironically, it turned out that person was John Tanton,” former FAIR deputy director Patrick Burns was quoted as saying.

• But Tanton isn’t the only one who spouted views that might tar the movement. The groups’ current work all reflects racism not far from Tanton’s. Some examples include:
• Mark Krikorian, current executive director of CIS, wrote in the National Review last year that “Haiti’s so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough.”
• CIS issued a 2008 study that bizarrely blame immigrants for global warming.  
• Former FAIR President Dan Stein in 1997 said, “Immigrants don't come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing … Many of them hate America, hate everything that the United States stands for. Talk to some of these Central Americans."
• In another National Review post Krikorian insinuated that there was a tie between the collapse of Washington Mutual bank in 2008 and their recognition as a top employer for Latinos.

These are not reasonable statements made by reasonable organizations. But a reader would not get that sense from the New York Times profile. It mentions the Southern Poverty Law Center’s designation of FAIR as a hate group (SPLC also dubbed Tanton’s “journal” The Social Contract a hate group) in passing and includes brief quotes from the pro-immigrant organizations America’s Voice and the Center for New Community, but has almost nothing critical to say about Tanton’s three organizations as they exist today.
Instead, staffers are repeatedly given the space to distance the organizations’ contemporary actions from the racism of their creator.
Roger Conner, FAIR’s first director, is quoted as saying, “My biggest regret is I looked at what he was doing, rolled my eyes and said, ‘That’s John.’ ”
The reader gets the sense that crass, overt racism is something FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA have put behind them—now, they rationally argue for increased restriction on immigration simply because they believe it to be a sensible policy solution.
This is because these organizations are often seen as credible sources on immigration rather than extremists, a fact reflected in their constant . Here are a couple of recent examples of the group’s citation by legitimate news sources:

• Earlier this month, for example, in an article in the Chicago Tribune about the children of immigrants whose lives are devastated by the deportation of a parent, a Center for Immigration Studies staff member is repeatedly quoted while his organization is described as one that simply “advocates tougher immigration controls.”
• On Friday, the Christian Science Monitor quoted CIS’s Krikorian in an article about Georgia’s recent anti-immigrant, SB1070-like bill, describing his organization as “a nonpartisan Washington think tank that highlights the consequences of legal and illegal immigration.”
• Last month, the New York Times quoted Krikorian for an article on “maternity tourists” from China, also simply referring to CIS as a group that “advocates tougher immigration controls.”

Tanton is an incredibly influential force in the national immigration debate who has repeatedly expressed openly racist sentiments in reference to immigrants, and his New York Times profileexposes this to the world. But the organizations he founded should not be let off the hook. Their racist rhetoric is usually a bit less crass than Tanton’s, but they're still incredibly bigoted."

Micah Uetricht is a staff writer with Campus Progress. You can follow him on Twitter @micahuetricht.
http://campusprogress.org/articles/ny_times_lets_racist_groups_distance_themselves_from_racist_founder1/